Posted
by
samzenpus
on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @07:31AM
from the do-it-yourself-or-not dept.

Gr8Apes writes: How many people does it take to fix a tractor? When the repair involves a tractor's computer, it actually takes an army of copyright lawyers, dozens of representatives from U.S. government agencies, an official hearing, hundreds of pages of legal briefs, and nearly a year of waiting. Waiting for the Copyright Office to make a decision about whether people like me can repair, modify, or hack their own stuff. why do people need to ask permission to fix a tractor in the first place? It's required under the anti-circumvention section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Even unlocking your cellphone required an act of Congress to make it legal.

It goes well beyond that. It's not just the engine control that's locked up, it's everything. The controller for the GPS, for the autopilot, for the accessories attached, etc.They could provide a mechanism that doesn't require hacking for replacing a fuel injector but they don't. The EPA requires no such total lock-down.

It's a nice idea, but the law doesn't agree with your simple assumption. Rather, according to existing law, the tractor hardware and the licenses to use the software have been sold, but not the rights to copy, modify, or disassemble the software. The tractor store probably didn't own those in the first place, so how could they sell them?

Rather, according to existing law, the tractor hardware and the licenses to use the software have been sold, but not the rights to copy, modify, or disassemble the software.

And this, IMHO, is complete bullshit. You have a right to know exactly what code is running in a machine you own, and how it works, down to every last freakin' instruction. You have the right to inspect the design of the property you own, and figure out how it works, and modify it if you choose, even if existing law doesn't respect that

You have a right to know exactly what code is running in a machine you own, and how it works, down to every last freakin' instruction.

I don't buy that at all. Don't get me wrong here. I don't think it should be illegal to hack the software that resides on a device you own (though I would be curious if the farmer actually owns this tractor since they are usually purchased on long term loan agreements). But saying you have a right to know means that manufacturers have an obligation to disclose. I would be willing to bet that no one is willing to divulge to you in great detail how the mechanics of your car's engine runs, or how your dishwasher (lets say an old one not opperated by software) does what it does, or the hysteresis of your water heater. Nor do most people believe the manufacturers should be required to. Whether you could figure this out on your own or not is besides the point.
And all this aside, I question the sensibility of what this farmer is trying to do anyways. He said it shuts down if a hydraulic sensor goes out and has to wait for days to get a new one. The more reliable solution would be to stock the sensors that go out most often. I would bet there is a pretty limited range of variants on the sensors. This is a lot safer than hacking the software of a multi hundred thousand dollar machine that would certainly void the warranty, probably violate the terms of any loan it is under, and possibly circumvent safety features.

It's called FALSE AND MISLEADING ADVERTISING YOU WITLESS FUCKING MORON.

Yeah, and what are you going to do about it? Nothing! Because if you take it to small claims court, it will just drain 8 hours out of your life and they probably won't show up and even if you got the judgment they'd just stiff you anyway; so what you are going to do is piss and moan like an impotent jerk, and then bend over and take it up the tailpipe!

I can do more with BMW, Mercedes, Honda, Mazda than I can with GM/Ford/Chrysler with just my laptop and a cheap china ODB to USB adapter. In fact a BMW is easier for a driveway mechanic to work on because I can easily ask it what is wrong. go ahead and query the transfer case module as to it's status on a GM or activate the calibration function.... Oh wait you cant.

All because GM works like hell to protect the revenue stream of its dealerships. so that $60 30 minute fluid change becomes $700 at a 1100% profit.

Dodge/Chrysler and the "60,000 mile change interval" fluid in their CVTs - originally single sourced from them at $80/qt, with 6 qts required for a change.

By the time those POS cars are at 120Kmi, they're barely worth $1500 on the open market, and they've got a planned maintenance that required $500 "worth" of fluid?!? - luckily, some 3rd party sources are showing up (and "only" charging $73 for a case of fluid) and in response the dealers have come down from $80 to anywhere from $28 to $18 per qt, depending... , but, seriously, at what point do we have to ask our legislators to step in and call BS on this kind of stuff? Fluids are one thing, it's pretty easy to call monopoly on that, but DMCA is a kind of monopoly protection that apparently has escaped the notice of anyone in power who might care.

I have a similar vehicle (Ford) built in 2004 that will not be getting a transmission flush or change of any sort. And I'm usually pretty good at maintenance. Why? The value of the car is such crap right now that it's worth more to me to just run it into the ground than to change the fluid out. (early CVTs were somewhat notorious for being garbage and maintenance or no, once they go it's 5-7k from a dealer.) No thanks, off to the junkyard if it ever conks out, and I'm not going to spend a dime on the t

The actual manufacturer of the CVT doesn't recommend fluid changes, except "as needed", which may be never. It's just the Chrysler factory service manual that says "60,000 miles" which I think is borderline criminal - putting something like that in writing when the actual designer and maker of the component clearly states otherwise.

, but, seriously, at what point do we have to ask our legislators to step in and call BS on this kind of stuff?

What exactly would you ask a legislator to do? How is the DMCA relevant to transmission fluid?

It seems like the free market is already solving this problem. One solution you listed was starting a company that makes and sells the fluid cheaper. Another, that you indirectly mentioned already, is to reduce the car's value by $500. Another is to buy a car that doesn't have this expensive lubrication cost.

They tried to do that to my mom when she took my truck into the dealer for maintenance. They wanted to replace the cabin air, engine air... for $100 a piece. I explained to her that I had reusable filters, and to not have it done.

Just about every car on the market you can pull info from it's ODB port via laptop if you have the right software. Lots of Ford engines are Mazda engines. The Mustang used to be built on the same lines as a Mazda. Are you working on pre 2007 BMW? That's might be easier with the tools you have because it might not be ODB II and it might not be CAN compatible. If the ODB to USB cord doesn't support that, then that might be part of your issues. I have never seen one easier then another as long as you are using

Actual Chrysler is one if the easiest to send commands on. It's very year dependent across ALL brands. With all the FUD over someone taking control of your car, different CAN buses have been separated out. That goes for the imports listed too. So to say the imports are all easy and the domestics are not is indeed bullshit. I can almost bet the BMW he was talking about is at least pre 2002.

I'm sort of reminded of the early 1990s, pre-Linux, where if one wanted an OS to run on their computer, be it a UNIX flavor, DOS, or OS/2, it cost, and wasn't cheap. It makes me wonder if there would be a niche for a company that produced farm equipment to charge a tad more, as they are not using the cheapest stuff from China, but circuits would be diagrammed, parts would be available, and the equipment would be designed from the ground up for serviceability. Unlike phones and tablets where shaving off a few fractions of a millimeter is critical, a 1950s-era tractor does the job just as well as a modern one.

Of course, there is reliability. A closed source, locked-down ECU might allow something to run for a longer time between servicings, at the cost of more expensive upkeep (since parts only come from the maker.) Would customers mind dealing with a more frequent maintenance cycle, in return for the fact that parts would be cheaper and easy to get ahold of 10-20 years from now, or is the mindset of "use it until it breaks, pitch it, replace it, repeat" too firmly ingrained in the mind of consumers?

It may take some time before this happens. I'm just waiting for "consolization" of cars, where vehicles come with the same engines across the board, but you have to pay license fees to enable the turbos, unlock all horsepower, use the BlueTooth functionality on the audio head... and none of those licenses will transfer with the vehicle, which guarentees that car makers make a significant, tidy sum when a vehicle is sold. Similar with farm equipment. Want to use the PTO? That is a licensed feature and even though the transmission supports it, the TCM won't enable it unless the manufacturer gets $2000 for a license key. Want to use a combine attachment? Another $2000, and it is only good for this harvest season, but you can pay $5000 to have it enabled for five seasons.

I've commented on this before. IBM, I believe, called this 'functional pricing' in the 1970s. When I started in computing in the mid 1970s, ICL (UK mainframe manufacturer) had two printers, a 300 lines per minute and a 600 lines per minute, no difference except a couple of resistors (this was pre 'unlock') and, of course, the price.

Of course, theoretically, 'competition' in 'markets' should stamp this out. However, a great deal of competition now seems to be for the best cheating (VW et al.) and best regulatory capture (DMCA etc.). Bless 'shareholder value' and screw the consumer.

"Of course, there is reliability. A closed source, locked-down ECU might allow something to run for a longer time between servicings,"

This is a complete falsehood. all the ECU's from the 80's and 90's were not locked down and easily modified. the 7730 GM ECU is the most reverse engineered ECU in history and was used for a very very long time across many cars. having it wide open never damaged the reliability of anything and in fact extended the life of many GM LT1 and LS1 engines by letting them live in other cars as engine swaps.

Locked down ECU does absolutely nothing at all to reliability. the only use for it is to protect a profit center.

Off market chips exist already at least for the diesel market.You can tune them as you desire with seperate settings for seperate situations. e.g. Power; fuel efficiency, off road, heavy load and what not.

Not sure if they are open source. They are used in the Australian outback, so I think you can say they are reliable.Some bypass the chip by sending false info.

That said, I am sure that using one will void the warrenty, if it is legal to use at all in your country

As soon as it hits cell phones. As much as we want to advocate the open source nature of Android, it has not really lead to open source phones. While there are many benefits of open source, and Android has many of them, when the software hits the hardware, it tends to fall apart. That is because most of us are not going to take the time to manually apply patches and fix source code even if we have the skill, even if we have the access.

I'm just waiting for "consolization" of cars, where vehicles come with the same engines across the board, but you have to pay license fees to enable the turbos, unlock all horsepower, use the BlueTooth functionality on the audio head... and none of those licenses will transfer with the vehicle, which guarentees that car makers make a significant, tidy sum when a vehicle is sold. Similar with farm equipment. Want to use the PTO? That is a licensed feature and even though the transmission supports it, the TCM won't enable it unless the manufacturer gets $2000 for a license key.

It wouldn't surprise me, given that a lot of the time the sportier version of a car has exactly the same parts, just a different tune on the ECU.

Thankfully there are alternatives that don't involve going back to the carburetor.

As Lumpy said, there is the 7730 GM ECU.

There are several aftermarket systems such as megasquirt, though it isn't completely open source.

There is the Saab Trionic 5.2 and 5.5 ECU which I have a lot of experience with. It requires the use of Saab's proprietary direct ignition cassette,

why do people need to ask permission to fix a tractor in the first place?

1. The EPA makes us do this. We have to encrypt stuff so that you can't easily add a emissions defeat device. If we didn't encrypt it every redneck farmer would be ripping off their DPF and other emissions devices because they didn't understand it. (Just like they did with catalytic converters way back when)

2. Even if you had the 'source' in front of you it'd still require tens of thousands of dollars in tools chains. I would put money on the fact that the source isn't even in C. Building ECM flashfiles, in some work circles, is up there with voodoo. These aren't your grandpas ECMs there isn't a "Tractor_ECM.c" file that you can make some changes to and recompile with GCC. As far as I know there isn't an OSS compiler available for embedded PPC and certainly not one available for eTPU functionality.

If you want to modify your tractor or car to do your bidding you're better off making your own fully open ECM from scratch. This is what they look like under the hood [dieselcontrolservice.com] and are engineered to live in places that a RaspPi or Arduino wouldn't live for more than a few days..

So that 'independent' repair shops can pop up across the country and remove emissions controls? They'll slap a "For off road use only" or "For demo testing only" sticker on the side while it continues to pollute at pre-2010 emissions regulations levels.

So that they can unlock power levels that took money and engineering resources to develop? What incentive does the company have to continue to develop them?

Different ratings may share a common set of hardware but 'just' have different maps and tunes. The difference between 900 HP and 950 HP is probably just a couple of bits. It doesn't mean it's "free". It's hundreds of man hours tuning both settings. It's months of test cell time burning diesel fuel to get the settings just right. It's reams of paperwork for the EPA to verify that we are within emissions and stay within emissions for so many hours.

The end result may be the difference between them may just be 0xfe to 0xff but the process it took to get there may have costed $1M+. Charging for those software changes are the way we stay in business and recoup R&D costs. Now you just want us to give it away to an independent shop for free?

This guy actually takes the time to provide the most informative posts for the article, and this is your response? I'm not saying I agree with everything the tractor manufacturers are doing, but he has at least laid out some very interesting factors to consider.

What I do know is the massive productivity enhancements new tractors and combines give to farmers (my dad is a farmer), and new electronic systems are a main driver of that. If America still wants its dollar menus and steak meals under $20, we cannot keep using the same machinery my dad did when he started farming 50 years ago.

Why not choose non-proprietary hardware in the first place? Too simple?

As much as Slashdot hates to acknowledge it money makes things work. We pay a company to develop a compiler instead of hoping some volunteers do it for us. We pay a company to have parts of a toolchain in place so we don't have to.

Too simple? Too hard. There's no piece of open source hardware that comes close to what tractor ECMs could do a decade ago. The OSS community seems to be more interested in dev boards than actual finished products. This ECM is what drives a lot of the world of tractors. [miltoncat.com] There are a dozen or so variations that have different pins populated with different IO but at its heart it's a 40(?) MHz Freescale MPC56XX chip with an eTPU to do all the fast timing.

I would love to tear the ECM out of my VW TDI and replace it with one of our own. I could write a new controller for my car in an hour or two with our toolchain. Without the tool chain it's a PITA and I haven't bothered.

We treat our tools as tools. I don't question how or who designed my hammer when I use it to hit nails. I just care that it doesn't break and works as it is designed. The 'toolbox' I'm sitting on right now is the sum result of decades of development ahead of where open source is.

IF anyone wants to help develop a completely OSS ECM and toolchain for ECM development I have a laundry list of what is needed to catch OSS up with where industry was in 2005, but I'm not holding my breath.

Start with Simulink. Model based design is everywhere [wikipedia.org]. Simulink is the only gorilla in the room at this point. With what I've seen people do with Python it shouldn't be hard (technically) to make something similar. You're going to have to make sure it meets industry standards like ISO 26262 [mathworks.com].

This basically sums up the problem with the economy - it is gummed up with jobs that do not produce real wealth. Sure, lawyers will say that copyright laws are important because they give an incentive for real wealth creators to do stuff, but there is no natural law that ensures that the amount of human energy that goes into protecting existing wealth would not have produced a net greater benefit for society if it had been directed at creating new real wealth instead.

We've been here before many times. War, essentially, is a massive mobilisation of human effort in a completely pointless (in terms of net prosperity) way. After WW2 we finally started to learn to put our efforts towards building more stuff for everyone, instead of trying to find better ways to steal some other country's stuff, and for many years this was incredibly successful for humanity.

The more I've learnt about how the current financial and legal system works, the more I realise how naive us tech people are, busy working on making stuff. Most engineers I know are smart enough to clean up against the sorts of people who get a law or business degree, but we tend to be too idealistic about how the world works. In the end it's just sad that we live in an economic system where you are better off financially trading the same houses between each other, rather than going out and building new houses (or transport systems to open up areas for new housing).

> This basically sums up the problem with the economy - it is gummed up with jobs that do not produce real wealth. Sure, lawyers will say that copyright laws> are important because they give an incentive for real wealth creators to do stuff, but there is no natural law that ensures that the amount of human> energy that goes into protecting existing wealth would not have produced a net greater benefit for society if it had been directed at creating new real> wealth instead.

Copyright was built with the idea to give incentive to do work so that work can make it to the commons and other people can build off of that foundation. It wasn't a magic formula to make cash and that's how it is treated today.

Copyright when it was originally conceived was to protect an author (creator) against a distributor stealing their work and profiting from it, pure and simple. To obtain a copyright, you had to file paperwork and a copy of your work with the Library of Congress, and you got 14 years of protection for providing a copy for posterity (one of the original goals of copyright. If you filed more paperwork, you could get that extended to 28 years, which seems more than enough to profit from your work in exchange fo

Your make-believe scenario is unlikely given that there is safety regulation via the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and liability for bugs that kill people (see: lawsuits in the news related to normal car software bugs that cause issues with braking/accelerating/etc.)

Even in terms of hardware cars have recalls for faulty parts (see: airbags) over a decade after the car was designed/built/sold.

You reverse engineer it, publish all the information anonymously and tell these companies to FUCK THEMSELVES.

It's starting in the Car world, The reverse engineering of the Honda ECU's you can get the details and source code out there if you look hard enough. some GM ECM's have been completely hacked, and the BMW dealership coding software has been released and you can get it.Tractors in the article are incredibly niche devices so it's going to take longer, but full details needs to be published publically and everyone needs to spread it far and wide.

You mean that if we hand responsibility to lawyers, the only outcome is lots of paper full of legalese, but nothing which is helpful to solve real-world problems? Damn, if just somebody had known that beforehand.

Wouldn't it be simpler at that point to simply chuck the original controller and replace it with something custom? Internal combustion engine control, and usual ways of controlling and managing the machine of a tractor's complexity aren't exactly new things and don't quite require a Ph.D. in controls engineering. I'd say it's something a decent undergrad should be able to prototype in a couple of months, I'd hope...

Why not offer the tractor bare, with no locked operating system? The farmer could then choose what software he wants to run his machine, once it becomes available. Sure, the manufacturer would offer their own OS but if the hardware was well documented, so could competition. It only makes sense, if the manufacturer wants to lock up their ECU with copyright law then the law should also compel manufacturers to provide documentation, just like they always have, for others to write code to run their machines. As

Maybe your tractor shouldn't have a computer. Maybe most of the crap in your home shouldn't have a computer, and it sure shouldn't be connected to the internet. The computer is the first part of any home appliance that breaks, and it is completely unnecessary in most cases.

Maybe your tractor shouldn't have a computer. Maybe most of the crap in your home shouldn't have a computer, and it sure shouldn't be connected to the internet. The computer is the first part of any home appliance that breaks, and it is completely unnecessary in most cases.

Yeah I don't get it. A tractor should be a bunch of gears and wheels attached to a large diesel engine with a seat on top. Where the fuck does a fucking computer come in??

It's so funny that everyone on Slashdot will argue that "Global Warming/Climate Change is 100% real and caused by your SUV, soccer mom!"

But then when someone wants to reasonably control air quality so that we can all breathe, the same people are saying, "Tear out the computer and bypass it and burn as much dirty diesel as you want to!"

It's so funny that everyone on Slashdot will argue that "Global Warming/Climate Change is 100% real and caused by your SUV, soccer mom!"

But then when someone wants to reasonably control air quality so that we can all breathe, the same people are saying, "Tear out the computer and bypass it and burn as much dirty diesel as you want to!"

For sure, all those tractors sitting in stop-start traffic would be a major culprit for air pollution!

The computer is the first part of any home appliance that breaks, and it is completely unnecessary in most cases.

That's a quality control / hardening issue, not the fact that it's technology. And with most of my home appliances that have ever failed, it's junk buttons or touch buttons that fail long before the actual "computer". I have a microwave that works perfectly fine aside from 4 of the 10 number pad buttons failing.

I'd rather have an oven with a digital temperature display and even a built-in timer function than a dial. And especially since it has the "cooktop on" and "surface hot" indicator/reminder lights

I'd rather have an oven with a digital temperature display and even a built-in timer function than a dial. And especially since it has the "cooktop on" and "surface hot" indicator/reminder lights (both requiring logic controllers / CPU).

My oven has both dials and a digital display. The dials still work great. The digital display not so much. Unfortunately, most electronic components don't work very well in the environment that most electronic components are subjected to.

But that's only a matter of a couple dollars in manufacturing cost to avoid this. If we can send electronics on an F-22 or a space shuttle, we can get an oven to be hardy against the harsh environment. But the electronics for an oven aren't in the heat. The thermostat is really the only thing with an excuse to fail from heat. A Core i7 gets hotter than the CPU in an oven control panel.

It's hard to try to do something that IS protected by the constitution:

Buy a gunFilm the policeRecord a government meetingSpeak out against your governmentGet a fair trialReceive a punishment that fits the crime

The list goes on. And on. And on.

So, given that it is so difficult to do things that ARE protected by the Constitution, it really should come as no surprise that it would be difficult in the extreme to do things that aren't specifically protected.

This is in best case unprecise. Yes you are correct in that the buyer do not own the copyright for the software, but you are wrong in claiming that the copy of the software can not be owned.

When someone goes to the bookstore and buys a book, he/she does not own the copyright of the book as a result of the deal. However he/she does own a (single) copy of the book. The copyright owner has absolutely no rights to restrict the book owners usage of this book. If the book is a murder mystery, the reader is free

When someone goes to the bookstore and buys a book, he/she does not own the copyright of the book as a result of the deal. However he/she does own a (single) copy of the book. The copyright owner has absolutely no rights to restrict the book owners usage of this book. If the book is a murder mystery, the reader is free to read the last page first to find out who did it. Or use the pages as toilet paper. Or burn the book publicly in protest. Or anything else he/she want to, completely independently of what the copyright owner likes or not.

These analogies don't quite line up with what is happening here. The book is an instruction manual, and the owner corrects an error in his copy.

It is still absurd that this is illegal just because the medium is digital.

you are wrong in claiming that the copy of the software can not be owned

Indeed, and some app stores (such as the Windows Store) even say "You own this app." I'm quite surprised that they would so openly use that terminology.

I do recognice that there is a difference between buying and renting a book, and that restrictions might apply for renting.

Similarly there would also be a case against reselling the modified copy (I'm talking about complete ownership transfer of your copy). Alt

On many devices, the user has to initiate copying the software from permanent storage into RAM in order to run it. This is true of any computing device not based on execute-in-place read-only memory (XIP ROM). But because of how 17 USC 117 is worded, only the owner of the device has the authority to perform this copying, not someone who's using it on the owner's behalf (MAI v. Peak).